One of the talking points surrounding Harry Redknapp's return to Portsmouth today has been the quietly thrilling suggestion that he might have to be accompanied by "minders". For some reason there is something appealing about the idea of Redknapp and a minder.

Maybe it's just the feeling it might work best if his minder could be a likeable, balding man in a Harrington jacket who has a way with the ladies and spends his time saying "all right lads, let's all just calm down" before hurling various tall, snarling men in tight brown suits around a disused tyre warehouse. Except that, happily, there will be no minders today. Instead, Redknapp will walk out at Fratton Park unassisted, an experience already being described with a sense of weary inevitability as "running a gauntlet of hate".

Does it really have to be this way? And what is a "gauntlet of hate" anyway, apart from a good name for a pallid early-1980s synth-punk band from Chislehurst who can't really play their instruments but have, like, amazing hair? The gauntlet of hate is a nod to the old army punishment of "running the gauntlet", which involved running between two lines of soldiers while they beat you with cudgels. Presumably, this becomes a gauntlet of hate when the people hitting you with cudgels have no thought of correction or rehabilitation or easing you back into society, and instead just really enjoy it.

In football the gauntlet of hate is quite a new thing, edging out the more traditional boo-boys, and also the knockers, who tend to have a single, specific grievance. The gauntlet of hate is more about ambient hate, diffuse, atmospheric hate, but always with the lurking threat of rogue direct action by a galloping lunatic in a leisure suit who gets alarmingly close to the dugout before being bundled over by a steward with a horseshoe beard who will later tell other stewards, in all seriousness, that he "took the mother down".

It feels like an aspect of Redknapp's managerial modernity that he is no stranger to the gauntlet of hate. Some people just suit it. Sir Bobby Robson, for example, never ran a gauntlet of hate. Mr Tumble from CBeebies will never run a gauntlet of hate. Running a gauntlet of hate requires a certain attitude, a way of standing, an austere and unrepentant self-possession. Redknapp flowers beneath the gauntlet. And if he's had some practice it's only because he's been unlucky in that every Premier League club he's managed has subsequently been relegated and suffered terrible financial problems (this isn't strictly true: Portsmouth won't be relegated for at least seven months).

More likely Redknapp's gauntlet tells us something about how football is now, because the gauntlet of hate is no longer an oddity. It's a gauntlet of hate every day out there. This is part of the legitimising language of football's New Crossness, whereby a gaggle of pointing men in caps are translated into a central agent in a self-propelling matrix of profitably enervated waffle.

Some might say this is all needlessly inflammatory. Others – perhaps bearded professors of sociology called Troy who talk in a patient voice – might point to a cathartic expression of rage that would otherwise have to be expended railing against bearded professors of sociology. Even thinking about anyone saying anything of the sort, particularly in a slow, patient voice, is enough to make you feel really, really cross.